Multimodal Crowd Counting with Pix2Pix GANs

Most state-of-the-art crowd counting methods use color (RGB) images to learn the density map of the crowd. However, these methods often struggle to achieve higher accuracy in densely crowded scenes with poor illumination. Recently, some studies have reported improvement in the accuracy of crowd counting models using a combination of RGB and thermal images. Although multimodal data can lead to better predictions, multimodal data might not be always available beforehand. In this paper, we propose the use of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to automatically generate thermal infrared (TIR) images from color (RGB) images and use both to train crowd counting models to achieve higher accuracy. We use a Pix2Pix GAN network first to translate RGB images to TIR images. Our experiments on several state-of-the-art crowd counting models and benchmark crowd datasets report significant improvement in accuracy.